Finding a perfect church
Dear H,
What would a perfect church look like? I imagine everyone has his own particular taste; but if I had to venture a guess, it would have the following characteristics.
First of all the sermons would be Bible-based. No jumping around from topic to topic or expounding for an hour on a single verse: the pastor would walk us through a book of the Bible, one chapter each week. This would keep him from putting too much of his own (usually half-baked) philosophy into it, and would allow the Bible to speak more for itself. He would also alternate, at the end of every book, between the Old and the New Testaments. This would keep anyone from ending up (respectively) too Jewish or too liberal.
Next I would have the church sing old hymns — fifty years or older — to a giant organ. This would give the church a timeless vibe, and would keep the worship from being too repetitive, effeminate, or embarrassing. I’d make a rule that three hymns would be sung every service, from the first verse to the last, and that any hymn could only be sung twice over two months, and then be retired for the third. That would keep a worship team from running any hymns into the ground, and would introduce the congregation to a slew of classics they’ve maybe never heard before. I would also have sacrament taken every week, and it would be placed up front (instead of deacons passing it out) so people don't feel pressured to take it.
Third I would have the pastor and the elders dress up. I couldn't care whether it's a suit or vestments, but the pastor has to have an air of authority, at least while he’s telling us about God, and the last thing I want to see is his ankles. I could even do without a pastor: a few trusted elders, rotating every so often like the Mormons, could be selected every few months by the congregation, and each one who serves his term would sit the next one out. That would keep the church from being dominated (or bored) by any one man, and would immediately get rid of a pastor's salary — which, building costs aside, is probably the church’s biggest single expense.
This brings us to the building itself. It would have to be a tall building, with stained glass windows and spires and stairs and vaulted ceilings, all to impress the idea of majesty. No ugly warehouses like most mega-churches today: the building should look ancient, almost, avoiding any feeling of a business, and people should be proud of it on some level, and it should have pews, and an altar for taking sacrament, and a giant cross behind the raised podium. A church should inspire people, if it can. You should walk by it and immediately be reminded that where you’re walking is a holy place.
There’s just one problem with the church description above, and it’s that I haven’t mentioned the church at all. What you saw was the institution and not the thing in itself, and I wanted to see how long I could go before anybody started questioning if this was actually what a church was.
The church itself is the people. No building, pastor, worship team, or schedule can contain it, although they’re usually mistaken for it, and most usually define it. In reality, church is what happens when two or more people are turned on to God and have to get together about it regularly for fun.
Thus each of these people, so far from being consumers, has something to bring to the table. Each and every parishioner is a work of art (in progress) for God to show off. A real church doesn’t give to each person — it receives from them. It means God personally touched everybody’s lives, and the light they get from Him gets shared with everybody else.
And everybody shares it a different way. Some of them are there to teach the Bible and tell about what they learned that week. Others are there to encourage others to be better and brighter, or to serve as examples for how to run families, or businesses, or gardens, or clinics. Others are there because they love to help other believers move from one house to another, or pay medical bills. Others help believers party together. Every week it might be the same thing, or maybe every week it’s something different. The one thing you should expect every week is that God is doing something new there — that things are going forward in a thousand little ways, that you are going forward, and that you’re each going forward because you’re each carrying each other.
None of this stuff where the sermon ends and people get up, avoid eye contact, and immediately leave the building. People touched by God reach out, or allow themselves to be reached out to, and go into “the church” ready to reach out. If random interactions are tough for them (and I admit, for most people, they are, especially first thing in the morning), we should have something ready to share — maybe a takeaway or a question about the sermon, maybe a kind word, maybe an offer of help, maybe just a listening ear. People should be ready for others’ highs and lows, confessions and successes. The first thing on everybody’s mind would be, God, please, I beg you, let me show your light to these people, and let them have that light for me. When someone's speaking up front, the audience, so far from just watching the sermon, should be constantly asking God for things through it — either guidance to understand the meaning, or strength to carry it out, or forgiveness for not carrying it out so far.
I said this would be an ideal church, and herein lies a problem. The chance you'll get this out of any church is impossible, and if you force it, or even ask the church for it directly, you'll ruin it. Dietrich Bonhoeffer put it, The person who’s in love with their vision of community will destroy community. But the person who loves the people around them will create community everywhere they go.
As such my advice is to simply be this person yourself, or at least to ask God to make you this person; and when you go to church, to find the other people who give off light too. And what you’ll find is that perfection never existed in a building or on a Sunday. But you’ll find that it exists in moments, between two people; and that what you're looking for isn’t a routine, but lightning — and it strikes when it does, and where it does, and that what we call a church is the closest thing you’ll get to a lightning rod. First we just collect the people with their heads in the clouds.
There’s an old story the Mormons tell about Joseph Smith. It goes that he was looking for a church, and there were so many that he got frustrated and begged God to tell him which one to go to. And God answered and said “None of them.” And I’m here to tell you almost the opposite is true. Earlier this year, when I really came alive, I asked God the same thing. And I found that if God really lives in you, you can go to almost any church* — and the people who know God’s light will see it in you, and love it, and you’ll see it in them, and your church will be these people.
Yours,
-J
P.S. One of the most frustrating things about being a Christian is that one moment you can be basking in the light and have your whole being turned on, and the next you’ll be rude to your kid, or imagining yourself taking off a neighbor's wife’s clothes. And these moments are embarrassing, and you hide from God like Adam in the Garden of Eden, and He'll be there, calling, waiting for you to answer, and you’ll just be hiding in the bushes, feeling naked.
That's why there's a temptation, once you’ve really touched a real church, to want to be "in church" all the time — to always feel clean, and loved, and focused on God. And this leads a lot of people to want to leave the rest of the world behind. And many of them used to.
Gibbon has an interesting passage in Decline and Fall where a Roman general landed on the island of Capraria, saw a colony of Christian monks for the first time, and nearly ate his own shoe.
The whole island is filled (or rather defiled) by men who fly from the light. They call themselves Monks, or solitaries, because they choose to live alone, without anyone to witness their actions. They're afraid of the gifts of fortune out of the apprehension of losing them; and, lest they should be miserable, they embrace a life of voluntary wretchedness. How absurd is their choice! how perverse their understanding! to dread the evils without being able to support the blessings of the human condition.
This of course was a misunderstanding. He never knew what the light was, so he never knew what it was like to try and hang on to it.
But the monk’s life has real appeals, especially in a world with newspapers and social media and yoga pants and too many bills; and I admit look at the monastery from time to time, and wonder if I should join one. But if it’s to run away from the possibility of sin and distraction, are you really a saint? Or are you just riding through life on training wheels? We were called to be a light in the darkness, and nobody cares if you shine brighter under a blankie.
In the McDuff translation of The Brothers Karamazov, Father Zosima, a holy monk on his death-bed, has a pretty scathing counter-argument against the Roman generals and other laughing heathens:
What they have is science, and in science only that which is subject to the senses. The spiritual world, on the other hand, the loftier half of man’s being, is rejected altogether, cast out with a certain triumph, hatred even. The world has proclaimed freedom, particularly of late, and yet what do we see in this freedom of theirs? Nothing but servitude and suicide! For the world says: ‘You have needs, so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the wealthiest and most highly placed of men. Do not be afraid to satisfy them, but even multiply them’ – that is the present-day teaching of the world. In that, too, they see freedom. And what is the result of this right to the multiplication of needs? Among the rich solitariness and spiritual suicide, and among the poor – envy and murder, for while they have been given rights, they have not yet been afforded the means with which to satisfy their needs.
Assurance is offered that as time goes by the world will become more united, that it will form itself into a brotherly communion by shortening distance and transmitting thoughts through the air. Alas, do not believe in such a unification of men. In construing freedom as the multiplication and speedy satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they engender within themselves many senseless and stupid desires, habits and most absurd inventions. They live solely for envy, for love of the flesh and for self-conceit. To have dinners, horses and carriages, rank, and attendants who are slaves is already considered such a necessity that they will even sacrifice their lives, their honour and charity in order to satisfy that necessity, and will even kill themselves if they cannot do so. Among those who are not rich we see the same thing, and among the poor envy and the frustration of needs are at present dulled by drunkenness. But soon in place of alcohol it will be blood upon which they grow intoxicated – to that they are being led. I ask you: is such a man free?
and this,
They think to establish themselves in truth and justice, but, having rejected Christ, they end by bathing the world in blood.
Remember this piece of prophecy was fully published in 1880 — almost 40 years before the Bolsheviks made their big entrance.
*I said almost any church and I meant it. I wouldn’t go to any church, for instance, where people are so enlightened that they know better, on many social issues, than two-thousand years of universal church consensus. Nobody who knows Christ better than the Apostles is humble enough for my taste. This obviously nixes the Anglicans.
Second, I wouldn’t go to a United Methodist Church. This church loves widows and orphans so much that the UMC's first-ever drag-queen pastor says “God is nothing. God must be f***ing nothing,” he says, “if her boundaryless, transubstantiated bodies of color are run down, beaten, and strewn in the streets of America instead of ruling the runways of life.” And if a member church disagrees and wants to break away from the UMC, why, they’ll take millions of dollars from them, have them sign a non-disclosure agreement, and maybe sue them into oblivion. This is probably why they got the name “united.” If this sounds slanderous, I got this information from the UMC's own newspaper.
Lastly, I wouldn’t go to Reformation Lutheran Church in Kansas. That’s where George Tiller, a man who made a living killing babies as they were being born, was allowed to be an usher. This stance of "judge not” was too radical for outsiders, though; and somebody decided to walk into their church, pull out a gun, and judge Tiller himself during the service — probably the most appropriate place for the sentence. Ann Coulter famously said of the scene, “I don’t really think of it as a murder. It was terminating Tiller in the 203’d trimester.”
Who was right here? Not sure, but I know who was most wrong, and it wasn’t the assassin.
Bravo.